What Pennsylvania Can Learn from America’s 250th
In December 1776, General George Washington led a ragged crew of patriots from the Pennsylvania shoreline and across the Delaware River in a bold strike to surprise the British Army, staving off the capture of Philadelphia. Washington later recalled “trembling for the fate of America,” as he watched the boats cross the river ahead of what would be a key victory for the Revolutionary army in securing liberty for the United States. It would be, as Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration Benjamin Rush remarked, “victory or death.”
The Delaware was but of one body of water that the Americans used to their advantage in the war. The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, carried out effective guerilla campaigns from the wetlands of the South, and the war reached its dramatic conclusion with the French fleet assisting with the siege along the shoreline of Yorktowne, Virginia.
As Pennsylvania looks to lead the 250th celebrations of the nation’s founding this summer and leaders continue to wrestle with some of today’s core policy challenges – that is, how states are coming together (or coming apart) over energy and infrastructure, for example – we would do well to examine how the streams, rivers, and oceans of this young nation led to the constitutional system we have today.
Nine years after the pivotal Delaware crossing, George Washington – our Cincinnatus who had given up his sword for a plow – was surveying the Allegheny Mountains in western Virginia and the headwaters of the Monongahela in the Ohio River watershed. The countryside was fertile, but without access to rivers that served as the highway system to get farm goods to market, the land would be worthless. Washington formed a company to build a series of canals and roads to link the Potomac and the Ohio rivers together.
But there was a problem: the Potomac served as the border between Virginia and Maryland, and both states would have to agree on the terms for tolls, fishing rights, and commercial law on the water and locks. While Washington’s company got its charter, many of these issues remained unaddressed and revealed the failings of the Articles of Confederation, which had been governing the newly formed country after the end of the Revolution. Delegates would meet several times before calling a summit in Philadelphia in 1787 where, at Independence Hall, a document of “glorious liberty” (as Frederick Douglass would later call the Constitution) would be put together.
Ratifying the Constitution would require a campaign of public persuasion, led by the Federalist Papers. Why should the newly freed people accept a stronger central government? John Jay, writing in the second of the papers, told Americans to look no further than the geography of the nation. American was not composed of “detached and distant territories,” he wrote, but “one connected, fertile, widespread country … watered with innumerable streams,” bounded by rivers and oceans and brought together by rivers that provide a means for mutual aid and trade among the states.
On the basis of appeals to liberty and the practical need for a strong economy in the states, the Constitution was ratified. The country’s economy would grow and develop through the “American system” of a strong national bank that finances internal improvements in infrastructure to facilitate trade and growth into the western states.
Today, tensions on trade and monetary policy run high in our nation’s capital. But states remain in the lead position in setting energy policy for their citizens, and both parties are grappling with how best to build the type of infrastructure to power the nation’s economy through the rest of this century and beyond.
And despite the poetic image of Washington and his men in boats on Christmas night, the policy lessons that followed forced Americans to confront a hard truth: markets that cross borders require institutions that do the same. Getting better outcomes means better partnership among states to build new infrastructure, not retreat into isolation.
The American System that emerged following ratification of the Constitution combined public vision with private execution – federal land grants enabled private railroad companies; state capital seeded private turnpikes; and the national bank financed internal improvements that individual states or private investors alone could not achieve. Pennsylvania and its neighbors should revive this mixed enterprise model for 21st-century energy infrastructure. States could leverage existing pipeline and transmission rights-of-way (both by maximizing what is already there and allowing for new builds) to accelerate construction of key infrastructure necessary for the 21st century. This approach splits risk appropriately: public entities ensure that infrastructure gets built and serves broad economic goals, while private execution brings efficiency and innovation.
Just as John Jay urged Americans to see their geography as destiny – a nation "watered with innumerable streams" that demanded unity – today's energy transition presents a similar imperative. The electrons flowing through regional grids are the modern equivalent of goods moving down the Potomac or the Ohio. This year’s 250th celebrations should include a revisiting of the kind of pragmatic federalism that Washington sought when he founded his canal company: states working together, combining public purpose with private capability, to build the infrastructure that will power prosperity for generations to come.
